Barry Rubin on "Peace" Journalism

From here:

...In my view, the quality of reporting in the mass media has become far more politicized, biased, and ideological in recent years. Yet, of course, there are many prior examples.

Another reason why it is important to study such cases is that common patterns tell you just where things went wrong. The case of Harrison Salisbury's reports from Moscow in the early 1950s provide a good example.

Covering dictator Joseph Stalin's funeral in 1953, Salsbury wrote:

"Mr. Georgi Malenkov [the new leader, soon to be supplanted by Nikita Krushchev] and his comrades at arms appeared to have the support and enthusiasm of Soviet citizens of all walks of life....The words of Mr. Malenkov seemed to have sent a surge of hope through the Soviet listeners."

This quotation shows some common characteristics of American or Western journalists and analysts to this day:

--The belief that in a dictatorship the masses really do believe what their rulers tell them and love the dictator, moreover that one can adduce what they believe from official sources. A good recent example of this is the Western journalists who went into Iraq when Saddam Hussein was dictator and reported on how popular and benevolent the government was.

--The systematic reinterpretation of radical statements into moderate ones, simply refusing to believe that anyone could really be an extremist and mean it.

--The failure to report at all on extremist statements and inciting rhetoric. Why? Because the reporter or analyst assumes that all ideology is just meaningless words since everyone is essentially pragmatic. (Wrong!)

In addition, the journalist (or politician, or academic) believes that if he reports extremist statements on the other side he will thus inspire or give backing to "hardliners" at home. Thus, to speak honestly is interpreted as contributing to conflict and the victory of "bad guys." And what "bad guys" is he most concerned about? Those who are conservative in his own country or who merely believe that there is a big threat to be combated.

This is what I call the concept of "lying for peace" and it always fails, as in the whitewashing of Palestinian behavior in the belief that doing so will make it easier to resolve the conflict. The truth, of course, is that the reality of underlying ideology, tactics, goals, and politics will come back to bite those who ignore them.

My P.S.

During the cold war years that he spent as a Times correspondent in the Soviet Union, his reportage came in for criticism. Gay Talese, a former Times reporter, wrote later in "The Kingdom and the Power," that in those years there were Times readers who considered that Mr. Salisbury's "dispatches reflected excessive sympathy for the Soviet Union."

For his part, Mr. Salisbury emphasized that his reports had been subjected to heavy censorship by the Soviet authorities, and he later criticized Times executives for not labeling them "Passed by Soviet Censor."

Yet censorship was not a problem for him in writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning series of 14 articles: he typed much of it in a room at the Hotel Algonquin after his return from Moscow.

The series included what he later described as "observations of reality as I had seen it in Russia from the Neva to the Amur, from the Lena to the Volga, a detailed reconstruction of Stalin's terror, an overview of Russia's real life -- the drunkenness, the bureaucracy and the famine of goods, services and ideas after nearly 40 years of Bolshevism -- a firsthand glimpse of the new leaders, the new policies, the extent to which they were, and were not, breaking from their Stalinist roots."

Though the articles won widespread praise, it was not unanimous. Robert Manning, a former editor in chief of the Atlantic, wrote later that "critics on the right damned the series for softness toward the Communists."

- - -